I'm not sure what these sceenshots are taken from but I guess from the singleplayer demo or preview version? Biggest difference seems be the ground texture which has strong occlusion mapping, sunrays, different HDR, larger drawdistance. Whats weird is that most or all these effects can be enabled in the DX9 MP beta so either some effects were "moved" to "veryhigh" (DX10) or are simply more efficient there, resulting in better framerate.

I think the distance to the textures is too low to actually tell of any possible improvement, maybe the detail layer is more detailed or the occlusion mapping is used more often.

Seriously what's up with limiting the draw distance (and maybe the LOD) in High (DX9) and Very High (DX10)? This is NOT a feature. For years we have been sliding the draw distance and the LOD and now we won't be able to adjust them cause of the bloody DX10? And on top of this... most of the DX10 features like occlusion mapping and sunshafts are enabled in the DX9 beta via tweaks. And finally this screenshot is not impressive at all. Hell it's even worse than the beta graphics

Seriously what's up with limiting the draw distance (and maybe the LOD) in High (DX9) and Very High (DX10)? This is NOT a feature. For years we have been sliding the draw distance and the LOD and now we won't be able to adjust them cause of the bloody DX10? And on top of this... most of the DX10 features like occlusion mapping and sunshafts are enabled in the DX9 beta via tweaks. And finally this screenshot is not impressive at all. Hell it's even worse than the beta graphics

it's due to the z-buffer limitations, possibly, i don't really know. but it really does look like **** how **** far away looks all ****ty and ****.